Atlas entry
What the charts and ledgers of Kworgalya record of this place. Its own story has not yet been told.
Nothing grows at the height Blood Gate holds. The fortress is built into the snowy mountains at the centre of the continent, above the last of the timber, where the year divides into a long hard winter and a short violent season of meltwater and rockfall. Grain, iron and fodder come up by pack-train; what goes back down is soldiering. Everything the place produces is military — walls kept sound against frost that splits stone open each spring, gates chipped clear of ice, watch turned over hour by hour on ramparts scoured bare by wind. The mountain offers no other living and none is asked of it.
Blood Gate is elven and long-serving. Postings here are measured against lifespans that run in centuries, so one officer may hold the same stretch of wall for longer than a lowland town takes to grow into a city. Raised in the third wave of expansion, the fortress has been a soldiers' place from its first stone: no merchants' quarter, no fields to walk out to, only barracks, magazines and stables. Its allegiance runs to the Bloodbound Covenant and nowhere nearer.
CityBrennisaA dark lower city hauls the water; a pale upper city spends it — the decadent western gate of the Infernate, where aristocrats keep Shadowflame Fairies the way other nobles keep…
CityBruntharThe brown city of four roads — gold shafts, tin-cut cisterns and the great sheep exchange of the north, where hostile blocs trade with the Infernate through a polite fiction…
CityBrynakorDeep-soiled grassland feeds Brynakor, a substantial Ashanar farming city of the west, sworn to Saradir while its governance and its wider bloc alike run to Torolok.
